What Is Genuine Love? (23rd Sunday - Cycle A)

In the Second Reading for this Sunday we see that the commandments pertaining to our behavior toward others can be summed up in the sentence: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself" (Romans 13:9). At first blush, such a summary might seem to give us license. After all, didn't the Beatles sing that all we need is love, while they turned away from Christian morality?

The answer is that true love conforms to God's divine law. If we truly love, we will not steal, or cheat, or betray others, or do even more heinous things. Far from giving us license do to whatever we want, true love brings us into perfect harmony with God's divine order, which then empowers us to become channels of God's love to everyone around us. The more we love with a pure heart, the more God's infinite love radiates from our very being.

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Image Credit: Christ teaching in the Temple, from Wikimedia Commons.

What the Walking on Water Teaches Us (19th Sunday - Cycle A)

The Catholic Church teaches the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, that is to say, out of nothing. God has no beginning or end. God exists for all eternity. When God created the world, there was nothing else in existence, other than God. Unlike in the creation stories of other religions, God did not use any pre-existent material out of which he would have made the world.

Having said the above, we also need to bear in mind that the ancient Hebrews did not yet have the concept of creation ex nihilo. The divine revelation of creation out of nothing came towards the end of the Old Testament period and is first found in the Second Book of Maccabees. The ancient Hebrew understanding before then was that God created the world by subduing the forces of chaos, which were symbolized by water. Throughout the Old Testament, God demonstrates his divine power in part by showing that he has power over water. God turns the Nile into blood. He separates the Red Sea and then closes it up again. He makes water flow out of the rock. He stops the flow of the Jordan River and then starts it up again. He withholds rain from the sky when the Israelites turn to evil.

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Photo Credit: The Sea of Galilee (c) 2016 by Zoltan Abraham.

The Cosmic Significance of the Multiplication of the Loaves (18th Sunday - Cycle A)

The Book of Daniel in the Old Testament contains a somewhat cryptic prophecy foretelling the timeframe of the coming of the Messiah. When the prophecy was deciphered, the timeframe pointed to the first century AD, exactly the time when Christ came among humanity. Thus, at the time of Jesus, there was a great deal of expectation that the Messiah would soon arrive.

The Jewish expectation was that a great leader anointed by God would come forward to lead the people out from under the oppression of the Romans. He would then establish the Reign of God, forging a great kingdom, greater than that of Solomon, which would be filled with abundant blessings. The people living at the time of Jesus eagerly looked for the signs indicating the arrival of the Messiah.

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Photo Credit: The rock upon which Christ multiplied the loaves and fishes, now inside the Church of the Multiplication in Tabgha (c) 2016 by Zoltan Abraham.

Love Requires Free Will (17th Sunday - Cycle A)

The Second Reading for this Sunday contains a key passage that has led to much debate in Christian history: "For those he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, so that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. And those he predestined he also called; and those he called he also justified; and those he justified he also glorified." (Romans 8:29-30)

During the Protestant Reformation, John Calvin, a French theologian, used this passage, in large part, to develop the doctrine of predestination, according to which God has determined from all eternity who will go to Heaven and who will go to Hell. Calvin's view of predestination became a core tenet of Calvinism, which came to be known as Presbyterianism. Today, the various branches of Presbyterianism still affirm the concept of predestination, but most have moved away from the strict Calvinist interpretation, and many would agree with the Catholic position on the question.

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Image Credit: Christ on the Cross, Anonymous, from Wikimedia Commons.

The Time that Is Allotted to Us (16th Sunday - Cycle A)

The Parable of the Wheat and Weeds, as the first parable from the Gospel Reading for today is often called, deals with age-old questions: Why does God allow moral evil to persist in society? Why doesn't God just remove all evildoers from the world? Or why doesn't he make all people act with goodness? A great deal has been written on this subject throughout Christian history.

At the heart of the answer is free-will. God is love and he made the world out of love in order to share his love with us. For us to be able to experience his love in a meaningful way, we have to have free-will. Otherwise, we would be just like robots programmed to respond in a certain way. By creating free-will, God takes a risk, because there is always the danger that we will abuse our freedom and turn against his love. But God loves us so much that he accepts this risk so that we might be able to experience his love.

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Image Credit: Sunset over the wheat field featured, from Wikimedia Commons.

Slow and Steady Wins the Race (15th Sunday - Cycle A)

In his parables, Jesus often uses incongruous images or anecdotes, which would have made people in the culture of his time do a double take. The purpose of this technique is twofold. One is to engage the audience all the more by making them think through the incongruities. The other is to illustrate certain points more clearly through exaggeration. For us today, removed as we are from the culture in which Jesus lived, the rhetorical technique is harder to follow. We have to make an effort to enter into the culture of the time.

For example, the parable of the lost sheep would have been very startling in the culture of Jesus. In the story, the shepherd leaves the ninety-nine sheep to chase after the one sheep that was lost. Such an act would have been incredibly reckless for a shepherd whose entire livelihood depended on safeguarding the flock. He could not have risked losing all the other sheep in order to save the one. He would have had to cut his loses and protect what he still had.

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Image Credit: Irrigated Wheat field, from Wikimedia Commons.

The Flesh and the Spirit (14th Sunday - Cycle A)

In different parts of the New Testament, we see a dichotomy delineated between the spirit and the flesh. We have to be careful as to how we interpret these passages. We could easily assume that the "spirit" here is synonymous with the spiritual, and the "flesh" with the material. But the meaning is a bit more complex. Flesh, in this context, refers to anything that takes us away from God; whereas spirit refers to anything that takes us toward God. Some material things, depending on what they are and how we approach them, can take us toward God. Some spiritual things, again depending on what they are and how we approach them, can take us away from God.

Christianity does not consider the material world to be evil. We believe that the material world is good in its nature, but fallen and marred by sin. Human nature too is fallen due to sin, and as a result, we have concupiscence, that is to say, a tendency toward sin. Due to concupiscence, our desires are disordered, and we are continually tempted to use the material world in an unwholesome way, harmful both to ourselves and to the world around us.

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Image Credit: Icon of the Resurrection of Jesus - Resurrection Gate, from Wikimedia Commons.